Friday Finds | 12th – 19th May

So if you’re friends with me on Goodreads, you may have noticed a whole bunch of books added to my TBR this week, but those were books on my Netgalley shelf that I had neglected to add to my Goodreads shelf, so they weren’t new… not what I would class as “finds”.

So, with that being said, these are the 3 best “finds” of the week.

Sockpuppet by Matthew Blackstad

Synopsis: Twitter. Facebook. Whatsapp. Google Maps. Every day you share everything about yourself – where you go, what you eat, what you buy, what you think – online. Sometimes you do it on purpose. Usually you do it without even realizing it. At the end of the day, everything from your shoe-size to your credit limit is out there. Your greatest joys, your darkest moments. Your deepest secrets.

If someone wants to know everything about you, all they have to do is look.

But what happens when someone starts spilling state secrets? For politician Bethany Lehrer and programmer Danielle Farr, that’s not just an interesting thought-experiment. An online celebrity called sic_girl has started telling the world too much about Bethany and Dani, from their jobs and lives to their most intimate secrets. There’s just one problem: sic_girl doesn’t exist. She’s an construct, a program used to test code. Now Dani and Bethany must race against the clock to find out who’s controlling sic_girl and why… before she destroys the privacy of everyone in the UK.

I was definitely drawn to this one because of the cover art! I was having a bit of a look back through BookBridgr and when I saw this one I was instantly intrigued. This book has been written and published very topically, considering online privacy is such a big thing in the news of present. This one sounds interesting and a bit different to what I normally read!

The Grip of It: A Novel by Jac Jemc

Synopsis: Julie and James settle into a house in a small town outside the city where they met. The move—prompted by James’s penchant for gambling, his inability to keep his impulses in check—is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to leave behind their usual haunts and start afresh. But this house, which sits between ocean and forest, has plans for the unsuspecting couple. As Julie and James try to settle into their home and their relationship, the house and its surrounding terrain become the locus of increasingly strange happenings. The architecture—claustrophobic, riddled with hidden rooms within rooms—becomes unrecognizable, decaying before their eyes. Stains are animated on the wall—contracting, expanding—and map themselves onto Julie’s body in the form of bruises; mold spores taint the water that James pours from the sink. Together the couple embark on a panicked search for the source of their mutual torment, a journey that mires them in the history of their peculiar neighbors and the mysterious residents who lived in the house before Julia and James.

I saw a Goodreads friend add this to their TBR and I was completely drawn in by the creepy looking cover! I love scary children-y looking stuff like this, so of course I had to investigate further. It’s a horror about a creepy house, so quite obviously, this is totally my kind of book and I will be looking to purchase it when my book overload is less stressful.
Heather, the Totality by Matthew Weiner

Synopsis: The Breakstone family arrange themselves around their daughter Heather, and the world seems to follow: beautiful, compassionate, entrancing, she is the greatest blessing in their lives of Manhattan luxury. But as Heather grows – and her empathy sharpens to a point, and her radiance attracts more and more dark interest – their perfect existence starts to fracture. Meanwhile a very different life, one raised in poverty and in violence, is beginning its own malign orbit around Heather.

If you saw my Netgalley picks this week, you would have seen this book feature. After umming and arring about requesting it, I finally did and got accepted. It has average reviews at the moment but people are saying it’s really dark and you all know, I’m definitely drawn to the darker books! This is a short book at 144 pages, so I aim to pick it up soon, as it won’t take me long to get through.

So there we have it, these are my most recent book finds.

Have you guys read any of these books / want to read any of these books? I’d love to hear what you think!

As part of The Well-Thumbed Reader’s Big Blogger, Little Blogger project, I’m introducing you to The Underground Bookdom, a fun blog full of YA book reviews, tags and more! Go check it out and follow!

That blurb for the first book is totally freaking me out because that’s something I already think about, how the internet knows too much about me! And ooh, that second one does have a scary children-y looking cover!